On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments on the constitutionality of California’s death penalty in the case of Jones v. Davis. This is the case from last year in which U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney ruled that the state’s death penalty system is unconstitutional.

“The dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system has resulted, and will continue to result, in an inordinate and unpredictable period of delay preceding [any] actual execution,” Carney wrote in his ruling. “As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose.”

California has the largest and most expensive death row in the nation, yet inmates are more likely to die of old age or suicide than be executed.

Since 1978, California has spent more than $4 billion on death penalty costs and executed only 13 people, according to a recent study. By 2030, when the population of San Quentin’s death row is projected to reach 1,000, the tab for maintaining the death penalty will reach $9 billion.

Judge Carney found that death-row inmates and their advocates are not to blame for the delays. The system is so backlogged that hundreds of direct appeals are pending before the California Supreme Court right now, and there are far more cases than there are attorneys qualified and willing to defend them.

And these are just the mandatory appeals, not opportunities to introduce new evidence that might prove someone innocent. Those appeals might not happen until a decade or longer after a trial.

Sixty percent of California death penalty cases are overturned once they get into federal court due to serious errors in their original trials. There is no end in sight.

I have repeatedly tried to fix this problem. In 2011, I introduced Senate Bill 490 to replace the system with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That would have saved the state close to a billion dollars by this point, without releasing any of the inmates.

Like other legislative efforts to reform the death penalty system, including study commissions, increasing funding levels, reducing the number of death sentences and other common-sense changes, that bill stalled. Nothing has happened.

Since 2011, public support for the death penalty in California has declined sharply. The Field Poll, which tracks voter attitudes, found that as of 2014 support for the death penalty had reached a 50-year low and that it has dropped as much in the past three years as it had in the previous 30.

It’s no surprise: By keeping this failed policy for a handful of people, we’re not being tough on crime; we’re just being tough on the taxpayer.

How many more students could we send to college on full scholarship? How many crumbling roads and bridges could be rebuilt? Investing in just about anything else would have been wiser.

The federal courts must act because California has not been able to fix this problem. Joined by Sen. Mark Leno and former Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, I submitted an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit asking the court to affirm Judge Carney’s decision that the state’s death penalty system is unconstitutional.

It’s time to end this charade.

State Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland, is chair of both the Senate Public Safety Committee and the Budget Subcommittee on Corrections, Public Safety and the Judiciary. She wrote this for this newspaper.